Tuesday, June 5, 2012

SALUTE TO NOEL COWARD

We are having a bit of a Noel Coward revival. There are
readings of some of his plays, a course or seminar at Marymount Manhattan
College, a marvelous exhibition at Lincoln Center’s Performing Arts Library,
where a lively Coward symposium is due on June 11 at 6 P.M. A lecture
demonstration is in the planning. In the two last-named events I am a
participant.

Lord Louis Mountbatten, a friend of Coward’s, had it right.
There are, he wrote, those who could equal Coward in any of the 14 or 15 disciplines
in which he excelled, but no one who could combine all those excellences in his
single self. I have always been a Coward fan, but having just reread his two
memoirs, Present Indicative and Future Indefinite, as well as the
voluminous posthumous Noel Coward Diaries,
I am more than ever convinced of his genius.

What must be born in mind is that, along with the manifest
heavyweight geniuses, the Prousts and Wagners, there are also lighter weight
geniuses who do not produce huge masterpieces, but achieve immortality in less
profound, philosophical or epic works. They do not invent new techniques or
shed new light on the historic past, but they charm generation after generation
with lighthearted entertainment.

It is surely remarkable that Coward wrote serious and comic plays,
long and short fiction, both words and music for theatrical and nontheatrical
songs, as well as poems and parodies. He was also an outstanding actor and an
accomplished stage and film director, notably in that masterly tribute to the
British navy, In Which We Serve.,
which he wrote, directed and starred in. He was also a great traveler, writing
admirably about exotic places and people, keenly sensitive to beauty in all its
forms.

He was also a dazzling wit, which, while not a profession,
constituted a social talent, making him a favorite lunch and dinner companion
of royalty, aristocracy, and artists of various kinds. Though almost totally
self-educated, he was enormously knowledgeable and a superb conversationalist.
He was an unofficial cultural ambassador for Britain in both hot and cold war,
and was even a sort of gentleman spy. He seldom if ever wrote a dull page, and was
no slouch at epigrams. Although, like most geniuses, self-centered, he carried
his self-centeredness lightly, with centripetal as well as centrifugal irony.
And he was a terrific letter writer.

He was homosexual, but what with England’s draconian laws
against homosexuality, rescinded only by his later years, he never came out of
the closet, but spoke up, if only privately, for gay rights, and was, if only
platonically, loving toward a good many women. Altogether, he had a gift for
friendship with all sorts of people, regardless of rank. But for those
deserving of contempt or reprehension, he possessed a stock of both, and was
not loath to let it hang out.

I found reading The
Noel Coward Diaries pure delight. Over its nearly 700 pages, I felt I was
getting ever closer to knowing Coward, and found his company consistently
stimulating, expectably humorous but also surprisingly humane.

His favorite epithets for people and things he liked were
“sweet” (best) and “dear” (a close second), and often both together. For things
and people he disliked, it was a tossup between “idiotic” and “ghastly.” But he
could make repetition feel not like redundancy but like a jolly refrain.

He had favorite phrases as well. A person might be “merry as
a grig” or “happy as a bee.” Things could be “all over bar the shouting,” to
end with “and that is that.” But we do not begrudge such verbal idiosyncrasies
any more than we would someone’s characteristic gesture or toss of the head. He
had, what Kenneth Tynan called “his hard-core court,” consisting of the actor
Graham Payn (co-editor of the diaries and at a time Noel’s lover), the actress
Joyce Carey (in many of his works), the designer Gladys Calthrop (who created
his early sets), his secretary and as it were manager, Lorn Lorraine, and Cole
Lesley, who, beginning as his valet (then named Leonard Cole), became another
secretary, manager, and probable lover.

The diaries, doubtless intended for eventual publication,
are studded with quotables. Of particular interest are Coward’s twin love
affairs with England and America, neither of them free from lovers’ quarrels.
The real quarrel was with the (mostly English) press, stunningly unfair to both
the playwright and the citizen. Some of it was based on envy of his many
successes, and some of it on his setting up residences in Paris, Switzerland,
Bermuda and, most steadily, in two homes in Jamaica. If some of it was to
escape British taxes, why not, given their exorbitance?

Curiously, Coward had scant use for opera and symphonic
music. Likewise for certain literary classics, almost always expressing his
dislike with the euphemism “too long.” Thus he would have none of Mozart (like
me) or Britten (unlike me). He had grave problems with the likes of War and Peace and Death of a Salesman, which I fully share.

Coward is not only good at snappy witticisms; he can also
astonish with his sagacity and good taste in longer passages. Consider the
following:

I have
plunged firmly through Our Mutual Friend.
What a great

writer
Dickens can be at moments, and how completely he fails

when he
becomes sentimental. Some of the characterization

In O.M.F. is masterly and some,
particularly Lizzie and Jenny

Wren,
abysmally bad. I suspect that he suffered from a funda-

mental lack
of taste. The descriptions of the river and London

and the
general atmosphere of the period areal superb, but

why, oh
why, those treacly, tear-sodden, pious, noble, com-

pletely
unreal scenes which I cannot believe that he believed

himself.

This is not only sound judgment; it is also compellingly
expressed. Closer to the epigrammatic is this: “When I eventually write my book
on the theatre there will be a whole chapter devoted to leading ladies’ dresses
and hair. They are invariably the main stumbling-blocks. Leading ladies’
husbands may also come in for some acrid comment.” Unfortunately, that book
never got written, but passages in the diaries, letters and memoirs more than
make up for it.

But, of course, Coward is better-known for outright
epigrams. Thus about Mary Baker Eddy: “She had much in common with Hitler, only
no moustache.” Or this: “It is hard to imagine, considering the inherent
silliness, cruelty and superstition of the human race, that it has contrived to
last as long as it has.” Or this, about posterity: “There will be lists of
apocryphal jokes I never made and gleeful misquotations of words I never said.
What a pity I shan’t be here to enjoy them.”

And again: “It is a natural enough malaise, this idealized
remembering, but should not be encouraged too much. There is no future in the
past.” Or this, after a day of auditions “Really felt worn out by the end of it
and oppressed by the thought of those legions of unattractive men and women
thinking they were gifted enough to entitle them to appear on the stage.” And
self-criticism, too: “Other people, less clever than I am, can often be dead
right when I am wrong.” More typical is this, about the autobiography of Monica
Baldwin, an ex-nun, I Leap Over the Wall:
“Very interesting, I must say. It has strengthened my decision not to
become a nun.”

That, of course, was frivolous, but other epigrams are not.
Thus: “Everything I have read lately has confirmed my long-held suspicion that
Christianity has caused a great deal more suffering, both mentally and
physically, than any other religion in the history of mankind.” (Written, to be
sure, in pre-jihad days.) And this, prompted by a later work of Evelyn Waugh:
“I do wish highly intelligent writers would not unconditionally surrender themselves to specific religious dogmas;
it really does bugger up the output.”

Nevertheless, Coward’s principal achievement is in his best
plays, correctly identified by Tynan as Hay
Fever, Private Lives, Design for Living, Blithe Spirit and Present Laughter, though
I would add the brilliant one-acters of Tonight
at 8:30,especially the musical Shadow
Play with its rather daring strategy.

About the avant-garde, Coward could be as wrong as about
classical music. Thus concerning Waiting
for Godot(which, to be sure, he only read and never saw),
“pretentious gibberish, without any claim to importance whatever.” But everyone
is entitled to some mistakes; why begrudge them to genius? To Coward’s many
talents we must add yet another: a great deal of wisdom.

4 comments:

Fair is fair: David Lean is listed as co-director for IN WHICH WE SERVE, handling all the action sequences. From Wikipedia:

"Coward had experience directing plays, but he was a novice when it came to films, and he knew he needed to surround himself with professionals if the project was to succeed. He had seen and admired Ronald Neame's work, and he hired him as cinematographer and chief lighting technician. Knowing he could handle the direction of the actors but would be at a loss with the action scenes, he asked David Lean to supervise the filming of those.

"Work began on 5 February 1942. From the start Coward was happy to let production crew members take charge in their individual areas of expertise, while he concentrated on directing the actors and creating his own portrayal of Kinross. But he soon became bored with the mechanics of filmmaking and after six weeks he came to the studio only when scenes in which he appeared were being filmed."

More like during one of the few interregnums -- l'entre-deux-jihads, 1683 and 2001 -- when Mohammedans were too weak compared with Unbelievers and in too much disarray to remount their perennial jihad.

The only truly, blessedly pre-jihad days unfolded in the first sevent centuries A.D.

It's long become standard on Internet forums to quote a portion of an article, and then write a comment in relation to that quoted portion. Quoted portions are usually identifiable by the inclusion of quotation marks on either end; viz., re supra:

About Me

I've written for over 50 years on theatre, film, literature, music and fine arts for the Hudson Review, New Leader, New Criterion, National Review, New York magazine, Opera News, Weekly Standard, Broadway.com, Bloomberg News, The Westchester Guardian and on the Yonkers Tribune website. I'm continuing my contributions to the New York Times Book Review, Weekly Standard and New Criterion. Recently I've been seen on Heat Street. I have a PhD from Harvard University in Comparative Literature.